The Looking Glass War Part 4

"The Director's very upset," she said.

"What was his wife like, Carol?" She was a well-dressed girl, a little taller than Sarah.

"n.o.body's met her."

She left the room, Woodford watching her. He took his pipe from his mouth and grinned. Avery knew he was going to say something about sleeping with Carol and suddenly he'd had enough.

"Did your wife make that cup, Bruce?" he asked quickly. "I hear she's quite a potter."

"Made the saucer as well," he said. He began talking about the cla.s.ses she went to, the amusing way it had caught on in Wimbledon, how his wife was tickled to death.

It was nearly eleven; they could hear the others gathering in the corridor.

"I'd better go next door," Avery said, "and see if he's ready. He's taken quite a beating in the last eight hours."

Woodford picked up his mug and took a sip of tea. "If you get a chance, mention that Registry business to the Boss, John. I don't want to drag it up in front of everyone else. Adrian's getting a bit past it."

"The Director's very tied up at the moment, Bruce."

"Oh, quite."

"He hates to interfere with Haldane. You know that." As they reached the door of his room he turned to Woodford and asked, "Do you remember a man called Malherbe in the Department?"

Woodford stopped dead. "G.o.d, yes. A young chap, like you. In the war. Good Lord!" And earnestly, but quite unlike his usual manner: "Don't mention that name to the Boss. He was very cut up about young Malherbe. One of the special fliers. The two of them were quite close in a way."

LeClerc's room by daylight was not so drab as of an impermanent appearance. You would think its occupant had requisitioned it hastily, under conditions of emergency, and had not known how long he would be staying. Maps lay sprawled over the trestle table, not in threes or fours but dozens, some of a scale large enough to show streets and buildings. Teletape, pasted in strips on pink paper, hung in batches on the notice board, fastened with a heavy bulldog clip like galley proofs awaiting correction. A bed had been put in one corner with a bedspread over it. A clean towel hung beside the basin. The desk was new, of grey steel, government issue. The walls were filthy. Here and there the cream paint had peeled, showing dark green beneath. It was a small, square room with Ministry of Works curtains. There had been a row about the curtains, a question of equating LeClerc's rank to the Civil Service scale. It was the one occasion, so far as Avery knew, when LeClerc had made any effort to improve the disorder of the room. The fire was nearly out. Sometimes when it was very windy the fire would not burn at all and all through the day Avery could hear from next door the soot falling in the chimney.

Avery watched them come in-Woodford first, then Sandford, Dennison and McCulloch. They had all heard about Taylor. It was easy to imagine the news going round the Department, not as headlines, but as a small and gratifying sensation pa.s.sed from room to room, lending a briskness to the day's activity, as it had to these men; giving them a moment's optimism, like a raise in pay. They would watch LeClerc, watch him as prisoners watch a guard. They knew his routine by instinct, and they waited for him to break it. There would not be a man or woman in the Department but knew they had been called in the middle of the night, and that LeClerc was sleeping in the office.

They settled themselves at the table, putting their cups in front of them noisily like children at a meal, LeClerc at the head, the others on either side, an empty chair at the further end. Haldane came in, and Avery knew as soon as he saw him that it would be LeClerc versus Haldane.

Looking at the empty chair, he said, "I see I'm to take the draughtiest place."

Avery rose, but Haldane had sat down. "Don't bother, Avery. I'm a sick man already." He coughed, just as he coughed all year. Not even the summer could help him, apparently; he coughed in all seasons.

The others fidgeted uncomfortably; Woodford helped himself to a biscuit. Haldane glanced at the fire. "Is that the best the Ministry of Works can manage?" he asked.

"It's the rain," Avery said. "The rain disagrees with it. Pine's had a go but he made no difference."

"Ah."

Haldane was a lean man with long, restless fingers; a man locked in himself, slow in his movement, agile in his features, balding, spare, querulous and dry; a man seemingly contemptuous of everything, keeping his own hours and his own counsel; addicted to crossword puzzles and nineteenth-century watercolours Carol came in with files and maps, putting them on LeClerc's desk, which in contrast to the remainder of his room was very tidy. They waited awkwardly until she had gone. The door securely closed, LeClerc pa.s.sed his hand cautiously over his dark hair as if he were not quite familiar with it.

"Taylor's been killed. You've all heard it by now. He was killed last night in Finland travelling under another name." Avery noticed he never mentioned Malherbe. "We don't know the details. He appears to have been run over. I've told Carol to put it about that it was an accident. Is that clear?"

Yes, they said, it was quite clear.

"He went to collect a film from... a contact, a Scandinavian contact. You know whom I mean. We don't normally use the routine couriers for operational work, but this was different; something very special indeed. I think Adrian will back me up there." He made a little upward gesture with his open hands, freeing the wrists from his white cuffs, laying the palms and fingers vertically together; praying for Haldane's support.

"Special?" Haldane repeated slowly. His voice was thin and sharp like the man himself, cultivated, without emphasis and without affectation; an enviable voice. "It was different, yes. Not least because Taylor died. We should never have used him, never," he observed flatly. "We broke a first principle of intelligence. We used a man on the overt side for a clandestine job. Not that we have a clandestine side anymore."

"Shall we let our masters be the judges of that?" LeClerc suggested demurely. "At least you'll agree the Ministry is pressing us daily for results." He turned to those on either side of him, now to the left, now to the right, bringing them in like shareholders. "It is time you all knew the details. We are dealing with something of exceptional security cla.s.sification, you understand. I propose to limit to Heads of Sections. So far, only Adrian Haldane and one or two of his staff in Research have been initiated. And John Avery as my aide. I wish to emphasize that our sister service knows nothing whatever about it. Now about our own arrangements. The operation has the codeword Mayfly." He was speaking in his clipped, effective voice. "There is one action file, which will be returned to me personally, or to Carol if I am out, at the end of each day; and there is a library copy. That is the system we used in the war for operational files and I think you are all familiar with it. It's the system we shall use henceforth. I shall add Carol's name to the subscription list."

Woodford pointed at Avery with his pipe, shaking his head. Not young John there; John was not familiar with the system. Sandford, sitting beside Avery, explained. The library copy was kept in the cipher room. It was against regulations to take it away. All new serials were to be entered on it as soon as they were made; the subscription list was the list of persons authorized to read it. No pins were allowed; all the papers had to be fast. The others looked on complacently.

Sandford was Administration; he was a fatherly man in gold-rimmed spectacles and came to the office on a motorbike. LeClerc had objected once, on no particular grounds, and now he parked it down the road opposite the Hospital.

"Now, about the operation," LeClerc said. The thin line of his joined hands bisected his bright face. Only Haldane was not watching him; his eyes were turned away toward the window. Outside, the rain was falling gently against the buildings like spring rain in a dark valley.

Abruptly LeClerc rose and went to a map of Europe on the wall. There were small flags pinned to it. Stretching upwards with his arm, riding on his toes to reach the Northern Hemisphere, he said, "We're having a spot of trouble with the Germans." A little laugh went up. "In the area south of Rostock; a place called Kalkstadt, just here." His finger traced the Baltic coastline of Schleswig-Holstein, moved east and stopped an inch or two south of Rostock.

"To put it in a nutsh.e.l.l, we have three indicators which suggest-I cannot say prove-that something big is going on there in the way of military installations."

He swung around to face them. He would remain at the map and say it all from there, to show he had the facts in his memory and didn't need the papers on the table.

"The first indicator came exactly a month ago when we received a report from our representative in Hamburg, Jimmy Gorton."

Woodford smiled. Good G.o.d, was old Jimmy still going?

"An East German refugee crossed the border near Lubeck, swam the river; a railwayman from Kalkstadt. He went to our Consulate and offered to sell them information about a new rocket site near Rostock. I need hardly tell you the Consulate threw him out. Since the Foreign Office will not even give us the facilities of its bag service, it is unlikely"-a thin smile- "that they will a.s.sist us by buying military information." A nice murmur greeted this joke. "However, by a stroke of luck Gorton got to hear of the man and went to Flensburg to see him."

Woodford would not let this pa.s.s. Flensburg? Was not that the place where they had located German submarines in forty-one? Flensburg had been a h.e.l.l of a show.

LeClerc nodded at Woodford indulgently, as if he too had been amused by the recollection. "The wretched man had been to every allied office in North Germany, but no one would look at him. Jimmy Gorton had a chat with him."

Implicit in LeClerc's way of describing things was an a.s.sumption that Gorton was the only intelligent man among a lot of fools. He crossed to his desk, took a cigarette from the silver box, lit it, picked up a file with a heavy red cross on the cover and laid it noiselessly on the table in front of them. "This is Jimmy's report," he said. "It's a first-cla.s.s bit of work by any standard." The cigarette looked very long between his fingers. "The defector's name," he added inconsequentially, "was Fritsche."

"Defector?" Haldane put in quickly. "The man's a low-grade refugee, a railwayman. We don't usually talk about men like that defecting."

LeClerc replied defensively, "The man's not only a railwayman. He's a bit of a mechanic and a bit of a photographer."

McCulloch opened the file and began methodically turning over the serials. Sandford watched him through his gold-rimmed spectacles.

"On the first or second of September-we don't know which because he can't remember-he happened to be doing a double s.h.i.+ft in the dumping sheds at Kalkstadt. One of his comrades was sick. He was to work from six till twelve in the morning, and four till ten at night. When he arrived to report for work there were a dozen Vopos, East German people's police, at the station entrance. All pa.s.senger traffic was forbidden. They checked his ident.i.ty papers against a list and told him to keep away from the sheds on the eastern side of the station. They said," LeClerc added deliberately, "that if he approached the eastern sheds he was liable to be shot."

This impressed them. Woodford said it was typical of the Germans.

"It's the Russians we're fighting," Haldane put in.

"He's an odd fish, our man. He seems to have argued with them. He told them he was as reliable as they were, a good German and a Party member. He showed them his union card, photographs of his wife and heaven knows what. It didn't do any good, of course, because they just told him to obey orders and keep away from the sheds. But he must have caught their fancy because when they brewed up some soup at ten o'clock they called him over and offered him a cup. Over the soup he asked them what was going on. They were cagey, but he could see they were excited. Then something happened. Something very important," he continued. "One of the younger ones blurted out that whatever they had in the sheds could blow the Americans out of West Germany in a couple of hours. At this point an officer came along and told them to get back to work."

Haldane coughed a deep, hopeless cough, like an echo in an old vault.

What sort of officer, someone asked, was he-German or Russian?

"German. That is most relevant. There were no Russians in evidence at all."

Haldane interrupted sharply. "The refugee saw none. That's all we know. Let us be accurate." He coughed again. It was irritating.

"As you wish. He went home and had lunch. He was disgruntled at being ordered around in his own station by a lot of young fellows playing soldiers. He had a couple of gla.s.ses of schnapps and sat there brooding about the dumping shed. Adrian, if your cough is troubling you ..." Haldane shook his head. "He remembered that on the northern side it ab.u.t.ted an old storage hut, and that there was a shutter-type ventilator let into the party wall. He formed the notion of looking through the ventilator to see what was in the shed. As a way of getting his own back on the soldiers."

Woodford laughed.

"Then he decided to go one further and photograph whatever was there."

"He must have been mad," Haldane commented. "I find this part impossible to accept."

"Mad or not, that's what he decided to do. He was cross because they wouldn't trust him. He felt he had a right to know what was in the shed." LeClerc missed a beat, then took refuge in technique. "He had an Exa-two camera, single lens reflex, East German manufacture. It's a cheap housing but takes all the Exakta range lenses; far fewer speeds than the Exakta, of course." He looked inquiringly at the technicians, Dennison and McCulloch. "Am I right, gentlemen?" he asked. "You must correct me." They smiled sheepishly because there was nothing to correct. "He had a good wide-angle lens. The difficulty was the light. His next s.h.i.+ft didn't begin till four and by that time dusk would be falling and there would be even less light inside the shed. He had one fast Agfa film which he'd been keeping for a special occasion; it had a DIN speed of twenty-six. He decided to use that." He paused, more for effect than for questions.

"Why didn't he wait till next morning?" Haldane asked.

"In the report," LeClerc continued blandly, "You'll find a very full account by Gorton of how the man got into the hut, stood on an oil drum and took his photographs through the ventilator. I'm not going to repeat all that now. He used the maximum aperture of two-point-eight, speeds ranging from a quarter of a second to two seconds. A fortunate piece of German thoroughness." No one laughed. "The speeds were guesswork, of course. He was bracketing an estimated exposure time of one second. Only the last three frames show anything. Here they are."

LeClerc unlocked the steel drawer of his desk and extracted a set of high-gloss photographs twelve inches by nine. He was smiling a little, like a man looking at his own reflection. They gathered round, all but Haldane and Avery, who had seen them before.

Something was there.

You could see it if you looked quickly; something hidden in the disintegrating shadows; but keep looking and the dark closed in and the shape was gone. Yet something was there- the m.u.f.fled form of a gun barrel, but pointed and too long for its carriage, the suspicion of a transporter, a vague glint of what might have been a platform.

"They would put protective covers over them, of course," LeClerc commented, studying their faces hopefully, waiting for their optimism.

Avery looked at his watch. It was twenty 'past eleven. "I shall have to go soon, Director," he said. He still hadn't rang Sarah. "I have to see the accountant about my air ticket."

"Stay another ten minutes," LeClerc pleaded, and Haldane asked, "Where's he going?"

LeClerc replied, throw-away, "To take care of Taylor. He has a date at the Circus first."

"What do you mean, take care of him? Taylor's dead."

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"You know very well that Taylor was travelling under an alias. Somebody has to collect his effects; recover the film. Avery is going out as next of kin. The Ministry has already given its approval; I wasn't aware that I needed yours."

"To claim the body?"

"To get the film," LeClerc repeated hotly.

"That's an operational job; Avery's not trained."

"They were younger than he in the war. He can look after himself."

"Taylor couldn't. What will he do when he's got it; bring it back in his sponge bag?"

"Shall we discuss that afterwards?" LeClerc suggested, and addressed himself once more to the others, smiling patiently as if to say old Adrian must be humoured "That was all we had to go on till ten days ago. Then came the second indicator. The area around Kalkstadt had been declared a prohibited area." There was an excited murmur of interest. "For a radius of-as far as we can establish-thirty kilometres Sealed off; closed to all traffic. They brought in frontier guards." He glanced round the table. "I then informed the Minister. I cannot tell even you all the implications. But let me name one." He said the last sentence quickly, at the same time flicking upwards the little horns of greying hair that grew above his ears.

Haldane was forgotten.

"What puzzled us in the beginning"-he nodded at Haldane, a conciliatory gesture at a moment of victory, but Haldane ignored it-"was the absence of Soviet troops. They have units in Rostock, Witmar, Schwerin." His finger darted among the flags. "But none-this is confirmed by other agencies-none in the immediate area of Kalkstadt. If there are weapons there, weapons of high destructive capacity, why are there no Soviet troops?"

McCulloch made a suggestion: might there not be technicians, Soviet technicians in civilian dress?

"I regard that as unlikely." A demure smile. "In comparable cases where tactical weapons were being transported we have always identified at least one Soviet unit. On the other hand, five weeks ago a few Russian troops were seen at Gustweiler, farther south." He was back to the map. "They billeted for one night at a pub. Some wore artillery flashes; others had no shoulder-boards at all. They moved away southward early next morning. One might conclude they had brought something, left it and gone away again."

Woodford was becoming restless. What did it all add up to, he wanted to know, what did they make of it over at the Ministry? Woodford had no patience with riddles.

LeClerc adopted his academic tone. It had a bullying quality as if facts were facts and could not be disputed. "Research Section has done a magnificent job. The overall length of the object in these photographs-they can compute it pretty exactly-is equal to the length of a Soviet middle-range rocket. On present information"-he lightly tapped the map with his knuckles so that it swung sideways on its hook-"the Ministry believes it is conceivable we are dealing with Soviet missiles under East German control. Research," he added quickly, "is not prepared to go so far. Now if the Ministry view prevails, if they are right, that is, we would have on our hands"-this was his moment-"a sort of Cuba situation all over again, only"- he tried to sound apologetic, to make it a throwaway line- "more dangerous."

He had them.

"It was at this point," LeClerc explained, "that the Ministry felt ent.i.tled to authorize an overflight. As you know, for the last four years the Department has been limited to aerial photographs along orthodox civilian or military air routes. Even these required Foreign Office approval." He drifted away. "It really was too bad." His eyes seemed to be searching for something not in the room. The others watched him anxiously, waiting for him to continue.

"For once the Ministry agreed to waive the ruling, and I am pleased to say the task of mounting the operation was given to this Department. We selected the best pilot we could find on our books: Lansen." Someone looked up in surprise; agents' names were never used that way. "Lansen undertook, for a price, to go off course on a charter flight from Dusseldorf to Finland. Taylor was dispatched to collect the film; he died at the landing field. A road accident, apparently."

Outside they could hear the sound of cars moving through the rain like the rustling of paper in the wind. The fire had gone out; only the smoke remained, hanging like a shroud over the table.

Sandford had raised his hand. What kind of missile was this supposed to be?

"A Sandal, Medium Range. I am told by Research that it was first shown in Red Square in November sixty-two. It has achieved a certain notoriety since then. It was the Sandal which the Russians installed in Cuba. The Sandal is also"- a glance at Woodford-"the linear descendant of the wartime German V-2."

He fetched other photographs from the desk and laid them on the table.

"Here is a Research Section photograph of the Sandal missile. They tell me it is distinguished by what is called a flared skirt"-he pointed to the formation at the base-"and by small fins. It is about forty feet long from base to cone. If you look carefully you will see tucks near the clamp-just here-which hold the protective cloth cover in position. There is, ironically, no extant picture of the Sandal in protective covers. Possibly the Americans have one, but I don't feel able to approach them at this stage."

Woodford reacted quickly. "Of course not," he said.

"The Minister was anxious that we shouldn't alarm them prematurely. One only has to suggest rockets to the Americans to get the most drastic reaction. Before we know where they are they'll be flying U-2s over Rostock." Encouraged by their laughter, LeClerc continued. "The Minister made another point which I think I might pa.s.s on to you. The country which comes under maximum threat from these rockets-they have a range of around eight hundred miles-might well be our own. It is certainly not the United States. Politically, this would be a bad moment to go hiding our faces in the Americans' skirts. After all, as the Minister put it, we still have one or two teeth of our own."

Haldane said sarcastically, "That is a charming notion," and Avery turned on him with all the anger he had fought away.

"I think you might do better than that," he said. He nearly added: Have a little mercy.

Haldane's cold gaze held Avery for a moment, then released him, his case not forgiven but suspended.

Someone asked what they would do next: suppose Avery did not find Taylor's film? Suppose it just wasn't there? Could they mount another overflight?

"No," LeClerc replied. "Another overflight is out of the question. Far too dangerous. We shall have to try something else." he seemed disinclined to go further, but Haldane said, "What, for instance?"

"We may have to put a man in. It seems to be the only way."

"This Department?" Haldane asked incredulously. "Put a man in? The Ministry would never tolerate such a thing. You mean, surely, you'll ask the Circus to do it?"

"I have already told you the position. Heaven knows, Adrian, you're not going to tell me we can't do it?" He looked appealing round the table. "Every one of us here except young Avery has been in the business twenty years or more. You yourself have forgotten more about agents than half those people in the Circus ever knew."

"Hear, hear!" Woodford cried.

"Look at your own section, Adrian; look at Research. There must have been half-a-dozen occasions in the last five years when the Circus actually came to you, asked you for advice, used your facilities and skills. The time may come when they do the same with agents! The Ministry granted us an overflight. Why not an agent too?"

"You mentioned a third indicator. I don't follow you. What was that?"